On March 31, the eve of House Bill 9 banning Tennessee drag queens from performing in front of sub-18-year-olds, I attended a drag show initially scheduled for the student center at East Tennessee State University. The venue was changed 72 hours before the show as ETSU, in its usual conservative-pandering gutlessness, moved the performances to the Millennium Center across the street. The reason given was some non-legal mishmash regarding wanting to follow the spirit of the law before it became law. When the implementation of the law was delayed by a judge's order hours before it was to take effect, ETSU was predictably left with uber conservative egg all over its administrative face.
Can you imagine being forced to share a foxhole with the ETSU administration? Gumby has more backbone.
I'm not particularly big on drag shows, having attended just six or seven in my 65 years, but I'm a free speech advocate, so I was there. To me, the drag queens' arguments were obvious and persuasive. How can a state legislate that one subset of people dressing a certain way and performing dance routines is legal (say, ETSU cheerleaders) and another subset of people similarly dressed and performing the same routines is illegal?
In other words, how can behaviors be deemed illegal based solely on gender? How can a state legislate differential treatment under a law? It's a hypocritical, self-contradictory can of worms.
What Do I Know?
What do I know about the effects of drag performances on the minds of those under 18 years of age? I know nothing. It's not a research subject I've ever explored, much less kept current regarding. I have zero idea of the behavioral consequences of seeing one, two, or five thousand drag shows. I have no real opinion of what those effects might be on 15-year-olds, 10-year-olds, or five-year-olds. But I also have no idea what the effects of watching cheerleading championships or online porn have on those same age brackets. I guess life is one big mystery to me since I don't have the clairvoyant powers of the Tennessee state legislature.
What I do know is that you can't say that a man dancing a certain way and dressing a certain way is guilty of a felony and a woman behaving identically is not. One would think that even (and maybe especially) the hardest right-leaning incels would back the drag queens based solely on men's rights.
Keeping Letters Separate
What surprised me about the event was the dichotomous forced-choice message being promulgated by both the event's speakers and the "you're going to hell" protestors outside.
The Tennessee legislature had also passed a bill preventing "gender affirming" medical treatments for young people. In other words, transsexuals would have to wait until they are adults to commit to medically changing genders. Personally, I have no qualms with this. Get a little living under your belt before deciding which gender you want to inhabit for another 50 years. Evidently, however, based on the crowd's reaction to various speakers, I'm one of the few drag queen proponents to feel this way.
All of the gender letters seem to be glommed together as some kind of distressed super-minority. None of the speakers, including presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, separated the drag queen debate from the underage pick-a-gender debate. Logically, I find this bizarre. The topics could not be more different except for the fact that not many people imbibe of drag queening or medical gender change.
White Dolemite
If you ever run into me while I'm wearing a maroon brocade suit and matching sequined shoes, look closely at my lapel. There'll be a name tag reading "White Dolemite."
I'm a big fan of Eddie Murphy's film My Name is Dolemite. I saw the original Rudy Ray Moore Dolemite movies when I was an undergrad at Penn State. In Murphy's biographical homage to Moore, he explains in one scene that he's not really a pimp. He's playing a character, a very carefully designed and detailed character. Such is the case for the drag queens in the Millennium Center show. They're promoting planned, practiced performance art. They are demonstrating an art form. They're playing characters. What the drag queens are experiencing can be described as the polar opposite of what underage transsexuals are experiencing.
Whereas the queens are performing well rehearsed characters and know precisely what they're doing on stage, underage transsexuals argue that they are being pressured to perform off stage in a gender that doesn't suit them. That they are being forced, moment to moment, to live inauthentically.
From a locus of control perspective, the dichotomy is clear. The drag queens are imposing their characters on the outside world. The underage transsexuals see the outside world as imposing on them and trying to define them. Really, these two disparate groups have little logical reason to be politically joined at the hip. One contributing factor creating this kind of odd team-up is the moral/legal certitude (some might say fascism) of legislatures such as Tennessee's. Criminalizing folks does tend to provide some common political ground.
Drag Queens in Dungeons?
When GOP legislators in these states that are as RED as my initials try to justify their extreme moral authoritarianism, they usually muck things up as they did with the drag queen legislation. For example, somebody found a YouTube video of a queen lap dancing a 10-year-old. Doesn't matter if it's one queen out of a thousand. Doesn't matter if it happened years ago. Doesn't matter if there are 5,000 drag queen YouTube videos and it's the only inappropriate one. The offending video becomes the raison d'etre for banning drag performances in front of minors.
Being a gambler, I recoil at the ramifications of this misuse of evidence. If the GOPers were consistent in their intent and morality, every minor would be banned from stepping foot in a Catholic church, given the proven pedophiliac propensities in the Church's past. That, however, hasn't made it into a House Bill 10.
The drag queen components of House Bill 9 propose that drag performances in the presence of minors are a misdemeanor at first conviction and thereafter a felony. I'd like to suggest that readers look up Tom Holland's performance of Rihanna's "Umbrella" on Lip Synch Battle. Holland was performing for all ages, so he was guilty of at least a misdemeanor (in Tennessee), given his pelvic thrusts while dressed in drag. Not only that, if he had previously rehearsed in front of fans, he would be guilty of a felony since he performed more than once. He'd be headed to a dungeon for draggin'.
And finally, a warning for the political creatures who think a collection of letters sewn together as a political force must be a good thing. The problem with this theory is that you never really know if hindsight will render one or more of the letters as an irrefutably bad path for most people. When you sew everything together, one defective part can leave you helming a patchwork PAC, not capable of saying much that's specific, stumbling into unintended consequences.
Just ask Victor Frankenstein.
Bob Dietz
April 14, 2023
